impworks Logo - a grinning imp in flight

How many Your Sinclairs for Grand Theft Auto IV?

Friday, August 28th, 2009

DanDiplo commented on Grand Theft Auto IV being 14.9GB installed on Twitter tonight and threw away the rhetorical question how long would the listing be in Your Sinclair. Unfortunately I had the back of an envelope and the Internet to hand…

Update: I spotted a couple of obvious mistake myself: Grand Theft Auto is 32 Bit not 8 Bit so each Byte will need 8 characters to represent it in the magazine rather than 2 and Your Sinclair was less than 5mm thick. This is the corrected version of the envelope.

1 Page for the loader in Basic (but as will soon become apparent that’s not significant)

1 page of Your Sinclair listing in 3 columns of 85 lines each including 16 characters representing 8 bytes = 2040 Bytes / page but Grand Theft Auto IV is 32 Bit so it takes 8 characters to represent a Byte so that means only 510 Bytes / page!

1 magazine of 100 pages = 51000Bytes or 50KB

So 14.2GB is around 2.4 million issues of Your Sinclair

Now adding in line number and check sum extras 1 page is 3 x 85 x 25 characters = 6375 key strokes

A 70 Word Per Minute Typist enters 350 characters each minute = 1800 minutes or 30 hours to type in an issue

So my back of the envelope calculation is that it would take 3000000 days to enter all the code or 8200 years if Grand Theft Auto IV had been listed in Your Spectrum.

From memory an issue was about 3mm thick so if you stacked them one on top of another they’d form a pile 7.2 km high or slightly less than 19 Empire State buildings (with the aerial) stacked on top of each other.

Anyone spot any more mistakes?

Leave a Comment

impworks © Copyright Mark Caldwell 1996 - 2024